RICKWORKS.ORG

Although winter has disallowed us from often enjoying our back porch, some recent warm weather allowed M||3 and I to fill the feeders a take in some of the local wildlife we like to consider our pets. Much to our surprise, the one day the temperature was good for the back porch, we spotted yet another new kind of bird, the Cedar Waxwing, which is pictured here at the right. There was a flock of about a half dozen munching on berries from our Holly bush.

I started paying attention to the avian wildlife when I originally lived here with my sister. When M||3 and I bought the house, I was worried since it had be some years since any feed had been in the sole feeder out back. Amazingly, they were back a day or so after we filled it and we’ve been adding feeders in our backyard to a total of five. When it is warm, we have wonderful evenings winding down after work and watching the voracious little creatures. All of them have their own personality, so we would nickname them with titles like “fat boy”, “whacky”, and “party guys” until we actually got a book to help determine who we were looking at.

After seeing the Cedar Waxwing, it occurred to me that we hadn’t really compiled a complete list of the birds we’ve seen. To our amazement, the tally has come up to 28 species, plus probably some more that we’ve been unable to identify.

Check out the full image list of seen birds on the next page.

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I was clicking through del.icio.us the other day and found this really cool effect that is being dubbed Lightbox JS. I was really impressed in that it allowed you to view images without navigating away from the page. With a little more searching on del.icio.us I found that some generous soul has already made a Wordpress plug-in for it. If you’d like to give it a whirl, click on the image of the statue in the post below. I like the benefit of being able to view a detail without having to navigate away from the page. Not only that, but it provides a “loading” graphic that allows viewers to know that something is happening while the image loads. Cool thing that is used with Flash all the time.

I’m dubious, however, that this can possibly work in many browsers across the board. Ajax seems to insert itself without much issue since its just Javascript, which has been functional in browsers since I installed a browser, but the use of .png graphic files and the CSS that is used to implement it makes me wonder. Still, what’s a cool web thing if you’re threatened by a little thing like browser compatibility?